Shade rows based on grouped column data

Hi. I am including a report consisting of data imported from a database. I am looking for a way to look at each row and perform some formatting based on data in each row.

1st 2 columns are ORDNO and ORDSTAT. I ran a macro to merge cells in those two columns if a row had the same data as the previous row of data. That creates a grouping by ORDERNO and ORDSTAT. Within each grouping, I'd like to automatically shade each alternate group and I'd like to highlight every instance within in each group where OPSTAT is greater than the previous OPSTAT value.

I've included a report where I've manually filled the first page or two with the shading and highlighting I'm trying to automate throughout the entire report. Hope this makes sense to someone ...LaborNotReported.xlsx

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I kept your shading grey/white per every second item as it makes it easier to read however your yellow shading for selected items has been turned to Red font bold as it makes it easier to locate (that is my own experience) we can change that to cater to your taste.

Pls make sure macros are activated. I copied your sheet to LaborNotReported (2) which removed all shading. Position yourself in that sheet and select from the developer tab Macros then activate the macro Highlight

Just by the meer fact that by looking at the shading it is not clear what you did and what you expect to have that it is enough for maybe revising what you need. I read your post 5 times already and looked at the file to be able to understand:

When a line should be white background
When a line should be grey background
When a line should be yellow background

and
I am not able to know. so therefore will not be able to draw a macro.

Maybe if you re-explain, at least what you have done so far does not highlight anything but a mixture of colors that makes it more confusing at least for us who don't really know the subject.

I need to flag operations within each order grouping where labor was not reported. The only way I can tell this is by the sequence of the status of each operation in each order group. Operations are always completed in sequence. For example, an order consists of 4 operations (OPSEQ) (0001, 0002, 0003, 0004) and the status (OPSTAT) = 40 for each operation then I know labor was reported complete for each operation. If operation numbers 0001 and 0002 are status = 10 and operation 0003 = 40 then I know operation 0003 is complete and labor was not reported for operation 0001 and 0002 when in truth they have been physically done. I want to highlight the rows 0001 and 0002 to show where labor was not reported.

the gray highlighting was just to separate each order group as a visual aid but I can work without that...

gowflow, I am totally floored. That's exactly what I wanted and I agree the red font is much better. I wasn't expecting to get a finished macro back but man you saved me huge time on this, especially since programming in excel is not really one of my strengths. thanks so much for this. :) Huge props....